The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

by Sy Montgomery

A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh.

A sense of self is an important component of consciousness, one that a number of philosophers and researchers claim humans have but animals don’t.

Brain size, of course, isn’t everything. After all, anything can be miniaturized, as computer technology plainly shows.

“I smell fish stress.” The scent is subtle—I cannot smell it at all—but the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well.

Theory of mind is considered an important component of consciousness, because it implies self-awareness. (I think this, but you might think that.)

consciousness—the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life.

But consciousness, says Australian philosopher David Chalmers, is “the hard problem,” precisely because it is so private to each inner self. Other philosophers suggest that the self is an idea without basis.

“Science does not need an inner self,” writes psychologist Susan Blackmore, “but most people are quite sure we are one.”

“The self,” Blackmore writes, “is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self,” she argues, “only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion—a useful fiction.” She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction. The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressi...

The desire to change our ordinary, everyday consciousness does not seize everyone, but it’s a persistent theme in human culture. Expanding the mind beyond the self allows us to relieve our loneliness, to connect to what Jung called universal consciousness, the original, inherited shapes shared with all minds; unites us with what Plato called the animus mundi, the all-extensive world soul shared by all of life.

Stephen Hawking in front of 60 Minutes cameras, it asserts that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness”

gratitude. My eyes brimmed, and a tear dripped into the water. Human tears of intense emotion are chemically distinct from tears produced by eye irritants; tears of both joy and sorrow contain prolactin,